[Ura-list] CONF: Language functioning in remote areas: The Arctic and beyond (Moscow / online, 26-28 October 2023)

[Egor Kashkin]

Dear colleagues,

Please find below a conference call I was asked to share. For any
questions, please contact the organizers: conf_minlang at iling-ran.ru

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The Laboratory for Study and Preservation of Minority Languages is
pleased to announce the conference “Language functioning in remote
areas: The Arctic and beyond”, which will be held at the Institute of
Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences), Moscow, on 26–28 October
2023.

The concept of remoteness (or inaccessibility) can be considered in
geographical as well as infrastructural and administrative dimensions.

In the first case, one deals with natural geographically conditioned
barriers (e.g., remoteness of the region or adverse weather
conditions). This is especially relevant for the languages spoken in
the tundra, jungle or mountainous regions.

In the second case, inaccessibility is created artificially, for
instance, transport infrastructure may be poorly developed in the
region, which makes it difficult to access individual settlements.
Apart from that, there is an “administrative” inaccessibility: limited
access to certain regions, reservations, state borders, etc. On the
one hand, this becomes an obstacle to potential language contacts. On
the other hand, this often complicates or makes impossible linguistic
research in the region; as a result, the idiom remains understudied
and its chances to obtain some official status decrease. Remoteness
can also be determined by various social factors, such as nomadic way
of life of the speakers, military conflicts in the region, etc.

During the conference, we are going to discuss extra- and
intralinguistic processes that languages in hard-to-reach regions
undergo, and try to answer, among others, the following questions:
what is the level of vitality of languages in remote areas? Do such
languages have a chance to change under the influence of languages
with a larger number of speakers? Does inaccessibility affect the
preservation of grammatical categories and structural properties of
the languages? Do such languages have common features, and is it
possible to build a specific typological profile for them?

In recent years, the Arctic region has often become a field for
searching for such patterns (cf. the study of the typology of language
contact in the North [Khanina et al. 2019] and the consequences of
ancient contacts for the structure of the languages in North-Eastern
Siberia [Vinyar et al. 2022], as well as recent attempts to describe
individual linguistic phenomena taking into account the factor of
geographical specificity [Sipőcz, Szeverényi 2022]). At the same time,
the influence of socio-cultural and geographic factors on linguistic
structure was discussed on the material of languages spoken far away
from the Arctic. region (see the collection [De Busser, LaPolla (eds.)
2015]). The announced conference welcomes the expansion of the areal
context, experts in languages of the Arctic and other remote (hardly
accessible) areas are invited to participate.

We particularly encourage submissions relevant to the following topics:

the sociolinguistic situation, the level of vitality of languages and
dialects in remote areas;
language contact in remote areas;
specific grammatical features of languages and dialects in remote
areas, if any can be found;
the problem of describing idioms in terms of their accessibility for
researchers (geographical, infrastructural, admitrative).
The conference programme will include three plenary talks and oral
presentations by other conference participants (20 min. for
presentation and 10 min. for discussion). It will be held in a hybrid
format (offline participation and online participation via Zoom). The
languages of the conference are English and Russian. Submissions are
limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author.

Invited speakers:

Anna Berge (University of Alaska Fairbanks)
Irina Samarina (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Patience L. Epps (University of Texas in Austin)

Those who would like to take part in the conference should send their
anonymous abstracts to the e-mail address conf_minlang at iling-ran.ru by
10 May 2023. The abstract should not exceed one A4 page (Times New
Roman, 12 pt,
single-spaced, margins 2.5 cm; .pdf, .doc(x) or .rtf formats), one
more page can be used for examples and references. Notification of
acceptance will be sent out no later than 25 June 2023.

The following information should be provided in the body of the e-mail:
— title of your presentation,
— the authors' first and last names and affiliations,
— your e-mail address and phone number.

Important dates
10 May 2023: deadline for submissions
25 June 2023: notification of acceptance
26–28 October 2023: conference (Institute of Linguistics, Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow; online via Zoom)

For any questions, please contact us at conf_minlang at iling-ran.ru

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